Many different telecommunications systems are known in the art. An example of such a system, for illustrative purposes only, is a UMTS network. Referring to FIG. 1, there is illustrated the main elements of a UMTS network. It should be noted that FIG. 1 does not represent a full implementation of a UMTS network, which implementation will be familiar to one skilled in the art. Rather, FIG. 1 represents some of the main elements of such a UMTS network for placing the present invention into an appropriate context.
A user equipment (UE) 100 communicates over a radio interface with a UTRAN (UMTS radio access network) 102. As is known in the art, the UTRAN 102 includes a base transceiver station (BTS) 104 and a radio network controller (RNC) 106. In the UMTS network the UTRAN 102 is connected to a serving GPRS support node (SGSN) 108, which in turn is connected to a gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) 110. The GGSN 110 is further connected to at least one external network, e.g. multimedia IP network, represented by reference numeral 112 in FIG. 1. Both the SGSN and the GGSN may be considered to be network elements. An example of a development of UTRAN is long term evolution (LTE).
There is always a need to improve the performance of telecommunications systems and it is an aim of the present invention to provide a new way of achieving this.